Everyone’s disappearing… Take me too, maybe? –– The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Between trying to study for my mid-terms and trying to finish reading The Master and Margarita I have to admit I’ve become very confused; everything is just mixing together in this one big container labelled “brain”.

And while this mixing is going on, certain aspects of George Orwell’s 1984 surfaced and made me cringe because I did not particularly enjoy that reading from high school, though I have to admit a lot of what happens here in The Master and Margarita is similar to that of the dystopian world of 1984. Everyone is spying on everyone, everyone is suspicious of everyone, and everything is the same for everyone. Kind of boring, except there’s supposed magic and sorcery in this, which piked my interests a little. That and it’s just downright creepy what happens to some of the characters in this novel.

During the lecture today, the idea of choice was mentioned, and that lead me to think about one particular slogan used in 1984, “Freedom is slavery”. Whether or not the citizens of Moscow had a choice of which radio channel to listen to, is it not all controlled by the government either way? “Freedom is slavery”; the illusion of freedom results in the slavery of the people. They think they have a choice, but they are actually controlled by the government in the choices they make.

This leads to another thought, of whether this form of control is present in our society today. In a sense, we are slaves of choice as a representation of freedom. I say this because we are constantly having to make choices through our everyday lives. Starbucks or Tim Hortons? Tea or coffee or hot chocolate or latte or cappuccino? Don’t all these small decisions in our lives enslave us to consumerism and capitalism, aiding the economy and the government as well?

The regulation of the population in The Master and Margarita also highlights this, in that people supposedly have a freedom to do as they please, but they do not, in fear for the secret police and the mysterious disappearances. Maybe I’m not articulating this very well since I am just wondering around aimlessly on this train of thought and will just disappear now amongst the studying and readings I have to do.

*Abra-Kadabra*

— cherie.

Naming the unknown –– Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler

What we have here is The Ambiguous Case of Antigone, where she is “unintelligible and unthinkable”. So… why do people even bother trying to understand her?

Here’s why I think so many people have attempted to define and classify Antigone as something, yet end up failing to some degree: because society and its people cannot deal with individual anomalies. They cannot deal with the appearance of something unknown, unable to be classified and put into order. In my opinion, it drives them insane like some kind of OCD for the whole of society, going along the lines of the exclamation “WHY WON’T YOU FIT?!”, similar to that of someone trying to complete a puzzle.

This form of anxiety and interest in the anomaly is greatly influenced by the idea that society fits together; everything is within society and has a place, name, and function in social structures. Because Antigone is such a far off point in the collation of humans in general, everyone looks at her like she’s some sort of rare extinct animal. I find that these specimens of humans or characters to be the ones who challenge what we or society believe as a whole. It’s interesting to think that in classifying Antigone, humanity might gain some understanding of what or who she is, and add her to the organized list of What To Name People.

But perhaps this isn’t the point of Antigone’s ambiguity, to be named, but rather to stay unnamed so as to always remain a mystery, an unidentifiable being that transcends society and social norms to give people something to fawn over and obsess about because she does not fit, and because she is special.

Ambiguity then, I think, is good for human kind. We do not know and we are uncertain.
But isn’t that the beauty of knowledge, that we might never know? I think so.